Posted
by
BeauHDon Thursday April 27, 2017 @05:00AM
from the to-be-determined dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When NASA began developing a rocket and spacecraft to return humans to the Moon a decade ago as part of the Constellation Program, the space agency started to think about the kinds of spacesuits astronauts would need in deep space and on the lunar surface. After this consideration, NASA awarded a $148 million contract to Oceaneering International, Inc. in 2009 to develop and produce such a spacesuit. However, President Obama canceled the Constellation program just a year later, in early 2010. Later that year, senior officials at the Johnson Space Center recommended canceling the Constellation spacesuit contract because the agency had its own engineers working on a new spacesuit and, well, NASA no longer had a clear need for deep-space spacesuits. However, the Houston officials were overruled by agency leaders at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC. A new report released Wednesday by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin sharply criticizes this decision. "The continuation of this contract did not serve the best interests of the agency's spacesuit technology development efforts," the report states. In fact, the report found that NASA essentially squandered $80.6 million on the Oceaneering contract before it was finally ended last year.

I fucking care. NASA gets less money every year from the US government. I'd prefer they don't waste it on stupid space suits they have no need for.

NASA has done this before, with the space shuttle. There is an excellent article on how the space shuttle was basically crippled by the Air Force's requirements (e.g. launch a satellite into polar orbit) and never even did that. [0]

I'd prefer NASA be spending their limited budget on more robotic probes, since they have had

the inspectors general of the DoD have found billions and billions of dollars of waste, but it will never make it to the slashdot front page, nor the 24 hour news cycle.

mostly because that waste amounts to huge welfare for huge chunks of voters who make money off of the gravy train. contractors, military people, the towns that grow up around bases, and projects, etc etc.

I fucking care. NASA gets less money every year from the US government. I'd prefer they don't waste it on stupid space suits they have no need for.

The question is whether it was obviously wasteful at the time the decision was made to fund the suit development. I don't know the answer to that either way but it's unfair to judge in hindsight if it wasn't clear at the time. R&D isn't some magic results dispenser that money in equals results out. Sometimes we pay a lot of money to learn what doesn't work. That's useful too though admittedly frustrating at times.

I'd prefer NASA be spending their limited budget on more robotic probes, since they have had excellent success with those so far, than some stupid goal of putting more very fragile and relatively useless meatbags in space.

And I feel that NASA should be spending more money putting humans into space and that w

This looks like another conservative trope about how the Federal Government wastes money, and somehow the private sector never does.

Arguably the private sector wastes FAR more money than the government does. 90+% of new businesses fail. Even the most successful companies make investments constantly that don't all pan out. The difference is usually that we have a lot less visibility into their failures nor do we have a lot of say over them unless we are investors. We are all "investors" in a sense in the government so we are a lot more sensitive to government waste as a result. But to pretend that the private sector is universally more efficient at everything is just demonstrably absurd. There are some tasks the government is far more efficient at than the private sector and vice-versa. The key is to know which is which and to not conflate the two.

There is a difference between wasting your own money and taking other people's money by gunpoint and wasting it.

Private enterprise doesn't need something as crude as a gun to take your money from you. They convince idiots such as yourself to give it to them willingly, sometimes even when you know you are being cheated. And the meme that taxation = theft is tired, false, and stupid. If you really believe that then move to one of the locations where they do not tax you. Quite a few exist though they aren't pleasant places to live. But you don't get to take your roads, police, health care, utilities, fire departme

Oh but it is. All the time and in vast quantities. People routinely waste money on crap products all the time from private enterprises. Private enterprise engages in fraud and waste on a scale that would make any government blush. If you need evidence of this see the behavior of the banks in the housing bubble leading up to the crash in 2008. The notion that private enterprise doesn't lie, cheat, steal, or waste your money can only be believed if you are an imbecile or are selling something yourself.

Donald Trump is blowing up $300 million missles in the middle of fucking no where.

Can you please tell me which missile costs $300 million that Trump blew up?

It would take 167 tomahawks to spend $300 but also a tomahawk doesn't cost $300 million as the OP is implying. The OP is probably referencing MOAB, which has a unit cost of $16 million and the program to develop it was a little north of $300 million. The Minuteman III ICBM has a $7 million unit cost and the Trident SLBM has a unit cost of $37 million. The retired Peacekeeper MIRV ICBM did have a $400 million unit cost.

The US doesn't have any missiles that have a unit cost of $300+ million, let alone Trump b

Nobody here is going to waste their time giving a rational scientific rebuttal to a bunch of wildly irrational and unscientific conspiracy theories. Saying that you don't believe something happened or that you don't believe the numbers because they just don't look right to you isn't the same as providing rational evidence or performing any kind of scientific action.

... continuing the project, and paying $200 million for a space suit that nobody needs.

Here the NASA looks for a bunch of idiots for obviously wasting $80 million. Lots of people in management positions would have found a way so that nobody can claim it was _obviously_ wasteful, even if it costs more money. So have mercy on them, they could have wasted a lot lot more.

It probably took a lot of work to award that program, get it started, and perhaps a lot of good work was happening. Perhaps NASA though that either the Constellation Program might come back under some other name, or that the next political masters might go forward with it etc... They probably hoped that the project might be saved, so they kept the project on a low burn, risk managing the fact that the money might be wasted in the end, in an attempt to salvage the project. When the reviewed the project it pr

That employees a lot of people. And those people give like 20-30% of what paid back. Probably tried to keep the contract to keep those people their jobs, until they could maybe find something else to work on, or already were on something needed and underfunded, just under the spacesuit contract. The latter happens a lot.

I feel like there is some information missing from this claim, particularly, the rationale for which NASA HQ decided to continue the contract. NASA isn't known for making illogical decisions, so it stands to reason that there is a logical explanation that is missing from this article.

The phrase "deep space suits are no longer needed" seems to give a clue. Maybe not RIGHT NOW, but I am sure at some point, it could be useful, maybe they wanted to finish up the blueprints for the suit so that it would be ready when they need it?

Someone in congress got to campaign on a fat contract that they brought back to their constituency! Same reason parts of the space shuttle were manufactured all over the country, even though it's not even close to the most cost-effective strategy.

So $80M over the course of about 6 years is $13.3M/year. Out of an annual budget of $18.4B. That's 0.07% of the annual NASA budget. Okay, so somebody made a bad decision. Reprimand them, do what you have to internally to avoid such decisions in the future, and let's move on. It's not enough that anyone outside of NASA needs to get their undies in a bunch over. If you're looking for government waste to be outraged about I'm sure you can find something orders of magnitude higher than a failed R&D project.

If you're looking for government waste to be outraged about I'm sure you can find something orders of magnitude higher than a failed R&D project.

It's things that like this over a very long period of time that got us the huge amount of debt we're in. The amount of bad spending doesn't matter - it is all very bad and it all contributes to the problem. Our current debt isn't just the fault of Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc... It is the fault of tens and hundreds of thousands of federal employees who misspent the taxpayers' money.

This is 100% wrong. The human attention span is finite and we only have only so many hours in a year we can dedicate to government accountability. You have to prioritize and pick your battles. The Social Security tax is the biggest revenue problem, and Military Spending, Medicare, and Medicaid are the biggest spending problems.

People like to complain about defense spending programs like the Littoral Combat Ship but they ignore the savings that come from a reduction in manpower. If you can staff an aircraft

The federal employees are pawns though. In the end, procurement is decided by the politicians. Lobbyists for $corp donate to $pol. Coincidentally, shortly thereafter $pol has a great idea for $project where a certain $item is needed. $item happens to be produced by $corp. Contracts go out for bid, $corp is selected to the surprise of no one, despite the fact that $smallbiz could have done it for a fraction of the price, but $smallbiz does not have some $obscure_capability that can only be provided by O

Since we are not going to Mars in the forseeable future, ALL spending related to human Mars missions is a waste.

Corporations are taking up the reins, it will happen within the decade. This is exactly the kind of thing NASA should be spending time on - support technologies - because they are too slow to be trusted with the actual colonization effort.